But that hum was too alluring. A wood that, at daybreak, was a roaring buckie was too persuasive—appealing to every fancy she had.
She began to feel like the ghost of some poor little queer fish that had crept back into the clammy shell it once inhabited.
But she stole on.
“It seems to come from somewhere behind that log-stack,” she told herself, peering through thick brambles and umbrella-like scrub of the tenderest fairy green, at a great pile of crossed logs, their ends gleaming, golden—a shack for the haunting shadows.
But when, taking her curiosity in both hands—if her courage was too frail to be handled—she reached that shadowy stack, the mysterious music—if music it could be called—had receded.
She heard it from a recess farther on—and deeper in the wood.
And now again she wanted to turn. But, at that moment, the soul of the distant thicket, it soared, indescribably sweet, shrill, clear, like the vox angelica, the angel stop upon an organ.
“Oh-h! I m-must be dreaming!” Yet, with hands clasped—carried out of herself—Una pursued that fleeing organ-note.
It brought her in less than another minute to the pine-wood’s battleground. Trailing, khaki-colored limbs of dead boughs, dead soldiers, which had fought bravely with last winter’s record ice storm, swept the earth, withering.
But among them there were other warriors, green recruits, whose flexible youth had so battled with wind and weight of ice that the branches, twisted, deformed, bowed to earth, were still green. Sap flowed in them. They were one with the living trunk.